So, I just came back from a performance of Twelfth Night, and it’s set me to wondering. For those not familiar with the play, one of the key plot devices is that a female character is disguised as a man for most of the play. It’s a classic gag, of course, but for it to work, it must be obvious to the audience that the character is, in fact, female. This doesn’t present a problem in the modern theater, but in Shakespeare’s day, there were no actresses.
What we have, then, is a man on-stage, dressed like a man, talking like a man, and otherwise portraying a man. My question, then is this: By what conventions would the audience have known that that character was “really” a woman?
It’s my understanding that the women’s roles in Shakespeare’s time were normally taken by boys, not men, so there would be some physical differences anyway.
Plus, I believe that all the plays that use this plot device have the girl come on first, as a girl, and announce that she’s going to dress as a man, so the audience wouldn’t be caught by surprise - they’d be expecting her to come on as a man (Viola after the ship wreck; Rosalind in “As You Like It” after being banished from court; Julia in “Two Gentlmen;” Portia in “Merchant” after spending most of the play as a woman; any others?)
I saw that play, Twelfth Night, done by a junior college with an all-male cast… They weren’t quite as helpful as Northern Piper’s troupe, though. The character was a man, made up to look like a woman, but dressed as a man. I guess the rest of the characters weren’t supposed to notice the rouge, etc.
Actually it was pretty well done, and the audience bought into it.
Doesn’t the San Francisco company, who do “Shakespeare in the Park” do the same?
Why on earth do they always SHOUT?
Peace,
mangeorge
Not to mention the fact that the Sebastian and Viola are supposed to be ‘identical’ fraternal twins (casting director’s nightmare, I suppose).
Our local company solved that with a small insertation. After both characters had been established, both actors walked onstage (‘missing’ each other in some great blocking and irony) and Feste walks onstage, hits a loud chord on the guitar for attention (Illyria was set in the Caribbean - lots of pastels and reggae), announces to the audience:
“For the purpose of this production, these two people (S & V wave to the audience) look exactly alike”
Hmm, male clothes, but female makeup? I guess that would work. I don’t suppose if anyone knows if that’s how it was done at the Globe? Thanks, all.
By the way, this troupe (the Montana Shakespeare in the Parks) solved the “identical” problem by just casting two people with similar hair (short and dark brown) and dressing them the same.
My guess is that contemporary audiences were so used to the theatrical casting conventions that they could easily distinguish the disguised ‘female’ character played by a boy from the real men, through mannerisms or visual cues.
I think of it in terms of Life of Brian. Terry Jones (a rather overgrown boy) played Brian’s mother by simply wearing a wig and using a falsetto voice. We buy it because we know Python and expect it. Those who don’t know Python should be thrown to the lions! er, I mean, they can ride along because of the long standing tradition of cross-dressing in British theatre and comedy. (“It goes back to Shakespeare, dear – where did that lion come from?.”) But, when Brian’s mother has to look like a man so she can go to the stoning, (did I hear someone say “Jehovah”?) the actor doesn’t attempt to look more Terry-like, he just puts on a fake beard.
As Northern Piper said, establish the female character first and then make sure the “male” impersonation isn’t terribly convincing. Albatross!
One question, has anyone considered the idea that the “boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy” theme is part of the humor? That is, people in Shakespeare’s day might have thought it an ironic twist that the boy playing Viola ends up pretending to be male. Since he was already male to begin with he shouldn’t have any problem pretending to be male.
Of course, there’s a difference between being a boy and being a boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy.
Damn, that’s a mouthful.
If you’ve ever seen Shakespeare in Love, they have quite a few things that you might not necessarily notice right. For example, the boy set to play Juliet uses a very high falsetto, while the man playing the nurse is made up to be somewhat of a caricture. One would think that the audience knew because it was convention, as well as because of those sorts of cues.
I had an English teacher a bit ago who said that it cultivated homoeroticism and idolization of attractive feminine males, but I don’t know how much stock I’d put in that one.
There may have been some sort of code given off by the actor to let the audience in on the Victor/Victoria bit.
While visiting England years ago, my friends and I were watching the “Black Adder” series set in the Elizabethan era. At one point, a female character (played by a female thespian) dressed as a man and went by the name “Bob.” When “Bob” first introduced “himself” to the title character, s/he raised their leg closest to the audience and slapped her/his own thigh. I must’ve looked confused becasue one of my British buddies explained that’s a code use in “pantos” (pantomimes) to let the audience know this was a female character in male drag (no matter the actual sex of the actor) that the other characters were NOT suppossed to be hip to.
Does this make any sence? And are there any theatre people out there who can elaborate on this?
I went to a gay bar on Halloween once, dressed as a boy and had men in dresses hitting on me. That was interesting. Sorry for the tangent. Carry on.- Jill
I read one paper while in graduate school which suggested that even though it was an accepted convention for women to be played by young men (and not so young men for some roles like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet), Shakespeare was never really comfortable with it. That, contended the writer, was the reason that Shakespeare wrote so few really good female roles. And that was the reason, the writer said, he had as many cross-dressing women as he did. It gave his male actors (especially those good actors at the cusp of manhood or just over the cusp) a chance to be male and show off their acting ability. She (the author of the paper, as I remember) defended her case rather well.
I’ve never heard that particular theory – but in my experience with Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare’s plays have considerably more good female roles than those of his contemporaries. Marlowe, for instance, doesn’t have any really outstanding roles for women, whereas Shakespeare has many – not as many as there are male roles, of course, but there are plenty of strong women’s parts: Rosalind, Beatrice, Katherine, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, just to name a handful.
Still, it’s probably true that there aren’t a whole lot of women in Elizabethan plays because of the convention of using boy actors…there probably weren’t a whole lot of them in the company, and probably fewer that were really outstanding…
In any event, given the gender-bending nature of the “drag” plays --and the Sonnets – I’m not sure I’d infer that Shakespeare was particularly uncomfortable with cross-dressing!
(Oh, and it’s also worth pointing out that many Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare add a bunch of female characters to take advantage of the fact that women were finally allowed to act on the English stage. [Whereas actresses had been performing on the Continent for some time.])
